K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

A Crux port for Zim

I use Zim a lot, as you might have noticed in my screenshots. It’s great for everything, and I strongly recommend it if you have any kind of hierarchical documentation that changes regularly or needs to be kept up to date. I use it to keep notes as I tinker with things; I can add and adjust pages to remind myself of commands I used or steps I took when I tried something.

I’ve been reluctant to put together a Crux port for Zim because there were a few dependencies that trickled down into Perl land, and all I know about Perl is how to spell it. Beyond that, I’m completely lost.

So in short: Fear of messing something up kept me from doing this before now. But I breathed deeply, put on the first season of Kung Fu, stuffed up my courage and waded into the mess. And I think this time I’ve got a winner.

Zim needs librsvg, which you can get out of the Xfce repos without drawing any other packages. It also needs shared-mime-info, which is in opt and may already be installed on your system. After that you need Perl’s File-BaseDir, File-DesktopEntry and File-MimeInfo.

That should do it. I know Zim is a bit esoteric, and installing a package in Crux takes a bit of work and time, so you might want to try it in another distro before going through all that. For me, it’s well worth it.

The irony of this is, I had been keeping Arch on one machine almost exclusively because I use Zim on that, and it was just easier to install it in Arch than it was to build all the interlacing ports. And it turns out it wasn’t that bad after all.